Gifts for Poets & Readers: Cloud Pharmacy by Susan Rich
I was already a fan of Susan Rich's work, starting her first collection, THE CARTOGRAPHER'S TONGUE, and now CLOUD PHARMACY has completely drawn me in.
The poems tackle many topics from love to aging, travel and home, fire to photography, but always with these gorgeous beginnings such as "Listen, to walk on this lake is simply practice..." and later from the same poem, "Love, watch me, as we show ourselves, go/beyond deer paths, frozen fog, the bomber moon--" The poems are steeped with image and story, but they dig deeper, there is a series of poems on the photographer Hannah Maynard who in the 1880's and 1890's did a series of self portraits.
Maybe this is the gift of this collection, each page offers you something more, from clouds to camellias, two sisters "sexy in black dresses," the poems returned to me continually "calling my name through the watery sky."
Truly a beautiful book for every bookshelf. I highly recommend this new collection.
The poems tackle many topics from love to aging, travel and home, fire to photography, but always with these gorgeous beginnings such as "Listen, to walk on this lake is simply practice..." and later from the same poem, "Love, watch me, as we show ourselves, go/beyond deer paths, frozen fog, the bomber moon--" The poems are steeped with image and story, but they dig deeper, there is a series of poems on the photographer Hannah Maynard who in the 1880's and 1890's did a series of self portraits.
Maybe this is the gift of this collection, each page offers you something more, from clouds to camellias, two sisters "sexy in black dresses," the poems returned to me continually "calling my name through the watery sky."
Truly a beautiful book for every bookshelf. I highly recommend this new collection.
Cloud Pharmacy by Susan Rich $16, published by White Pine Press
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More praise for Cloud Pharmacy:
"Cloud Pharmacy is a book of lyric fire. In our epoch of quick and shallow literary conversation it is rare to come across such level of attentiveness as one finds in this book."—Ilya Kaminsky
"In a central sequence, Rich explores nineteenth-century photographer Hannah Maynard's proto-surrealistic images, looking in grief-heavy places for revelation. The result is wonderfully strange and unsettling; this is Rich's most haunting collection yet."—Kathleen Flenniken
"Rich's gorgeous poems affix moments, both magnificent and minute. And in exquisite and playful poems, a pageant of a life in process develops before our eyes."—Oliver de la Paz
Susan Rich is the author of three previous collections of poetry. She lives in Seattle, Washington
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